Ben Sanderson: The attribution problem

On the afternoon of Saturday, July 9, the plume of orange smoke from the Cold Springs Fire was visible from over 50 miles away. A couple of campers from Alabama were taking refuge at the impromptu shelter set up at a nearby high school, and suspicion fell on them when they claimed to have seen where the fire started. They were arrested and face felony charges for endangering lives and property.

The press and authorities were quick to draw judgment. This is the kind of attribution that society likes: matching a tragedy with a villain, making an example of those who have taken a risk too far. This is the dialogue we want to hear; this helps us make sense of the destruction.

But there could well be another arsonist responsible for this fire. Me. And probably you, too.

I buy electricity from a company that relies on coal for almost 50 percent of its supply, I drive across the state, and fly across oceans. The Cold Springs Fire probably released about 5,000 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, about the same amount the city of Boulder emitted in the same period. So, in effect, the town and the fire were "burning" at the same rate, but Boulder's fire is invisibly contained within cars and power stations.

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These emissions are, for sure, warming the planet — but there is some evidence that they are also increasing the risk of wildfire in the western U.S. The last few years have seen more wildfires in Colorado than the historical precedent: the average area burned in 2012 and 2013 was an order of magnitude greater than the 1970-2000 average. Looking at the western U.S. as a whole, those years with the warmest spring/summer temperatures, which allow the land to dry out quickly, tend to be coincident with the largest number of large fires. This relationship should be concerning because a solid feature of future climate projections is warmer springs and summers in the mountain west.

But attributing the cause of this increase in fire is complicated. Wildfires are part of the natural cycle of a forest (or should be), but almost every aspect of forest fires has been warped by humans: We ignite them by being careless and we suppress them to protect our property, but in so doing we store up vast amounts of fuel to burn in mega-fires. Meanwhile, we continue to emit heat-trapping gases which at the very least have the potential to intensify fires we might experience in the future — which might in turn act to release more carbon into the atmosphere.

On the local scale, our mountain communities are invested in their forests not burning down, encouraging cutting down trees and trimming grass to clear fire breaks around properties. We idolize the fire service (rightly), and we abhor those who take foolish risks in fire season.

But at the macro-scale, our ability to think in this way breaks down. When the crime is distributed amongst all of society over decades, we are unable to attribute or accept fault, and struggle to adapt appropriately to changing risk. Indeed, to talk of increased climate risk at a time when a visible impact is actually happening seems taboo. We focus endlessly on the exact details of the disaster, but when the fire goes out, the news cycle moves on without ever addressing the deeper question of how we avoid careering hopelessly into a world where these events are an order of magnitude more likely.

In the "live" news coverage, it is only sometimes mentioned that such events will be more likely in the future, and it is almost never said that society's choices in the next couple of decades can stand to significantly modulate that risk. To scientists, these statements are often unremarkable to the point that they are not worth saying — but the power of saying them when the media is briefly watching is nevertheless significant.

It is therefore a challenge to be faced by all of us: changes in risk due to climate change need to be integrated into our thinking as a society. We have demonstrated that we are capable of building moral constructs for risk attribution; after all, most people deem it is unacceptable to start a fire in the forest in July. It just needs one huge extra step: to realize that we ourselves are at fault.

Ben Sanderson is a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

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